The authors of this book are drawn to baseball’s great losers. Not to individuals, but to entire teams. We prefer our calamities as the product of collective effort, a shared culpability not unlike Watergate. […] Besides, to err is human, to screw up royally requires a team effort.
—George Robinson & Charles Salzberg, On A Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball’s Worst Teams [1], a 1991 volume in urgent need of updating
Parachuting into an opponent’s ongoing storyline can inject a person with presumptuousness. Good team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how good they are? If they beat your team, man, they really are good. Bad team you’re seeing for the first time all year after hearing how bad they are? If they lose to your team, man, they really are bad. Historically bad team whose record would seem to say it all?
Just don’t lose to the White Sox, OK?
The Mets didn’t lose [2] to the White Sox on Friday, which was OK. More than OK. It was the best-case scenario. The Mets scored five runs and upped their record to 71-64. The White Sox scored one run and fell to a record of 31-105. Did the Mets outplay the White Sox at a magnitude reflecting a 40½-game gap in their seasons to date? In the course of nine innings, that would be difficult to achieve.
It would also be irrelevant. Just win the game against a team it is universally agreed you can’t lose to. You lost two of three to the woebegone Angels and so-so Athletics. Those kinds of stumbles happen. A stumble here can’t, not if your playoff aspirations are genuine. We’re never sure if the Mets are, but let’s lean on the side of them being in the race and believing they can remain there.
[3]Benintendi, get me rewrite.
The White Sox have won 31 times in 2024, so they are capable of beating somebody now and then (more then than now, apparently). Based solely on Friday night’s evidence, I can’t definitively say that I just watched the worst major league baseball team of my lifetime. They didn’t take advantage of early opportunities to score often off Tylor Megill [4] — who seems ripe to be left unprotected in an expansion draft or a compensation pool or whatever avenue might grant his career a fresh start — and then stopped creating opportunities. They kept the Mets from crossing home plate intermittently but not enough. Their fielding looked a little logy in spots, including one that allowed an inning-ending double play to become a run-scoring fielder’s choice upon further review, yet no errors were charged. J.D. Martinez [5]’s key home run notwithstanding, both sides lofted a ton of fly balls that failed to generate much excitement.
From the small sample size, and if I didn’t know what the record said in advance, I doubt I would recognize the White Sox as any worse a team than any team that loses on a given evening. The important thing in the present is they lost, 5-1, keeping the Mets apace with the Braves, who won. If you’re tracking the current White Sox versus the Mets of our beginnings, it was, depending on your perspective, reassuring or disturbing to see the ’24 Pale Hose grow a little more wan vis-à-vis our Originals. After 136games in 1962, those Mets were 34-102, or as many games ahead of these White Sox as the Braves of today are ahead of the Mets of today.
We know we want the Mets of today to catch the Braves of today. As you can read in this article Tim Britton wrote [6] for The Athletic on Friday, feelings among those who’ve immersed themselves in Met history aren’t unanimous on the matter of who oughta hold the crown as worst (a crown which would be made of what…wurst?). You’ve got fans like me who are like, yeah, be my guest, Chisox, yet unperverse pride is also prevalent in the 1962 Mets not only having been THE 1962 Mets, but continuing to epitomize shorthand for all that can go wrong going wrong…yet going wrong in a manner that never raised a critical mass of ire. You’re gonna get mad at people known as Marvelous Marv, Choo Choo and Vinegar Bend? There’ve been plenty of crummy teams since the 1962 Mets, but nobody’s established a brand name so readily recognizable for a certain order of ineptitude. Crummy? Yes, but adorably so. The 1962 Mets could have sold Entenmann’s [7].
Imagine a world where somebody else serves as the flagship for a baseball team being the worst a baseball team can be. That world doesn’t seem far off. While I didn’t see anything obviously glaring in the performance of the 2024 White Sox in their 136th game that screamed WORST! TEAM! EVER!, I could definitely infer that their Friday night output seemed practiced and seems repeatable. Horrible teams might get blown out disproportionately relative to other clubs. They mostly lose lifelessly by scores like 5-1. Come to think of it, the 1962 Mets’ 120th loss occurred in the city of Chicago by the very score of 5-1. Joe Pignatano killed the year’s last potential rally by hitting into an eighth-inning triple play and then retired. Before long, he’d be coaching the very same franchise in a World Series and growing tomatoes in its bullpen. Let’s see Andrew Benintendi match that life path.
Incomparable flair for defeat may forever belong to us, but “they’re the 2024 White Sox of…” is poised to enter the language of lazy comparisons, meaning the legacy of the 1962 Mets will likely revert fully to family ownership. Maybe everybody else will have a new comp for lousiness. We will know who the 1962 Mets are. So be it, I figure. Records are made to be broken, even if the records have to be tripped over, crashed onto, and shattered by accident. Teams that have attempted to tank never lost 105 of their first 136. What the White Sox are doing has taken some ingenuity, but they’ve probably benefited from quite a bit of luck, too.
There’s a variety of luck, you know [8].
Should the South Siders surpass us in the wrong all-time direction, we will still hold the modern National League mark for futility. That’s no small detail. We exist because in the gaping void that encompassed 1958 to 1961, New York yearned for National League baseball. Leagues were separate and not at all equal. National League fans considered National League ball better. So glad to have it back, they didn’t wholly mind they were getting the least skilled version of it available (save for the teams that visited the Polo Grounds — they all seemed quite good). The circumstances that created the Mets wouldn’t exist today. Differentiation between National League and American League baseball is mostly in the mind’s eye. Hell, we’re in the midst of playing an American League team right now. Somewhere, George Weiss harumphs in disgust.
One caveat to that diminished distinctiveness, however. The 1962 Mets lost 120 games. Then the 1963, 1964, and 1965 Mets went out and lost 111, 109, and 112 games, respectively, proving one year is a fluke, four years is a trend. Since 1965, the competitively balanced National League has produced exactly four teams to as much as tour the subterranean neighborhood the Mets established. Two, the 1969 Expos and 1969 Padres, had the excuse of being expansion teams, which is an excuse we know well. Each went 52-110. The Expos ascended to the heights of 73 wins in their second year, and their losing records hung around mundanity for the most part as the 1970s progressed. The Padres stayed lousy for quite a while, but not 52-110 lousy.
The only two other National League teams to prove themselves 1965 Mets (if not 1962 Mets) dismal were both Diamondback squads. In 2004, three years after winning the World Series, Arizona went 51-111; three years later they were division champs. In 2021, the D’Backs plunged to 52-110 just four years after a playoff appearance and two years after winning 85 games. Two years later, they were NL champions. Maybe the roof was malfunctioning.
[9]Since 1965, hardly anybody in this league has been what we once were.
The 2024 White Sox are about to become the ninth American League team since the season Casey Stengel hung ’em up to lose at least 109 games, with the infamous 1988 Orioles of 0-21 notoriety just missing the cut at 54-107. The woefully misshapen AL gave us not only the 2003 Tigers (43-119) we remember making a run at our standard, but the 1996 Tigers (53-109) and the 2019 Tigers (47-114). Lest it appear this is only a Tiger problem, the 2021 Orioles went 52-110 three years after Buck Showalter led them to 47-115 in 2018. The Astros were getting so bad that the National League kicked them out following 2012 (55-107), and as a new American League entry in 2013, they got only worse (51-111). The 2023 Oakland A’s were starved by an indifferent ownership into 50-112 territory. And pour out a Labatt Blue for the 1979 Blue Jays. They went 53-109, which was somehow not the worst record Canada ever produced. (That would be Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby”.)
The American League has kept coming at history with a slew of 1962 Mets wanna-bes, but none has had what it takes to lose 120 games. The 2024 White Sox just might and then some. It could be that after this season no team will again be tracked for their pursuit of the worst record ever because no team could possibly be as bad as the 2024 White Sox, suggesting the 1962 Mets won’t be casually invoked outside of Metsopotamia any more than, say, the 1916 A’s (36-117) or 1935 Braves (38-115)…except by those who relish a good story well told [10]. After 62 years, if somebody else insists on being the new avatar of abysmal, so be it. The 2024 Mets over the next two games should be happy to help the 2024 White Sox on their way to whatever winds up worse than 40-120.
Just remember: it was one of ours who didn’t touch first base [11] first. We’ll always have that. And he didn’t touch second, either.